RICHARD PARRY-JONES 1951-2021

Parry-jones was a legend of the car industry, responsible for transforming a generation of Fords, but also so much more

RICHARD PARRY-JONES, WHO HAS DIED AT THE age of 69, was responsible for transforming Ford’s dynamic reputation in the ’90s. A Ford man from the start of his working life until he retired in 2007, he managed 30,000 engineers around the world and delivered multiple vehicle projects as chief technical officer.

RPJ was passionate about engineering and relished the challenge of rescuing Ford’s reputation after withering press reports of the dire MKV Escort. The Focus that replaced it was a spectacular improvement. Damper iterations during new car development occasionally run into the hundreds. On the Focus, around 1000 were tried, front and rear.

Mondeo, Ka, Fiesta and Puma were all delivered under his direction and they were so good that rival car makers had to respond, raising standards across the whole industry. It wasn’t just dynamics, either; RPJ focused on and improved the whole driver experience.

He invented ‘the 50-metre test’, which asked engineers to drive slowly to notice the subtleties of all attributes. His own driving was best described as ‘not for the faint-hearted’, yet even after a brief drive he could dissect a car’s dynamics. A man of astounding intellect, he had much time for those who knew their stuff and he communicated with easy clarity, warmth and infectious enthusiasm.

He was friend and mentor to Matt Becker, now chief engineer at Aston Martin, who first met him in 2007 when RPJ came in to assess a chassis tuning project Becker was working on. ‘I knew about 50 per cent of the answers to the questions he asked. He wasn’t trying to catch me out, he just wanted to have the data to correlate with what he was feeling subjectively.

‘His intellect and capacity to remember all of the detail of a drive of multiple cars was incredible. He would then explain what was wrong with the car but communicate it in a positive sense. He had this way of bringing you on the journey. It was like “an audience with RPJ”. He’d have everyone from powertrain to calibration, to NVH, to dynamics, to ergonomics in the room. Everyone would just sit there either with their mouths open, or writing down and collating everything he said.

‘I don’t just look after dynamics; I look after a department. The best advice he gave me was to make a pie chart of time and within that think of the activities. Then think where can you add the most value as a chief engineer, or as a person that has unique skills, and apply the highest percentage of your time to those areas. The other areas, he said, give them a light touch, give the autonomy to the managers of those areas. I use that advice every day.’

Tim Holmes was heading up comms at Ford of Europe when he first met RPJ. ‘He was addressing a room of 30 engineers about the next Mondeo, equally comfortable with philosophical concepts as he was debating the optimum pull-down force necessary to close the tailgate on the estate.

‘Volumes have been written about his genius as an engineer and his gift for distilling key customer desires from a great long list of product attributes. Where it all came together was his ability to find simple cross-cultural references that spoke not only to British engineers in Dunton but to Germans in Cologne and Americans in Detroit, so that the regional teams fulfilled the same forensically detailed global vision. Everyone these days talks about aligned product DNA, but this was the Big Bang moment from which Ford’s new-era driving dynamics were born, and which set the bar for all the other volume producers.’

evo contributor Richard Porter met RPJ on a number of occasions, most memorably in 2007, on the launch of the third-generation Mondeo in Sardinia. ‘I shared a car with RPJ, me driving, him talking passionately about transforming Fords into fine driving machines. He was terrific company. At the hotel that night the PR seemed relieved I’d been at the wheel. Why the concern? “Well…” the PR began tactfully, “…RPJ likes to chuck it in and then sort it out.”

‘The next day RPJ offered to show the editor of

Autocar and a competition-winning reader what the Mondeo could do. I got into a different car with comms boss Tim Holmes. We were bumbling

along when another Mondeo overtook us at speed. I could just make out the terrified editor of Autocar in the back seat. There was a blind corner coming up. The other Mondeo went into it with no flicker from the brake lights. Holmes and I swore loudly and rounded the bend ready to find a Mondeo-sized ball tumbling across a field. But all we could see was a speck disappearing up the next straight, the architect of its handling excellence having fun at the wheel.’

Mike Cross, manager of vehicle integrity at Jaguar Land Rover, met RPJ in 1990, after Ford bought Jaguar. Cross headed up the ride and handling department at the time. ‘He was a lovely bloke, first and foremost. He was also, obviously, an extremely talented vehicle evaluator, but there’s a lot of those. What was unique to him was that he was very articulate and able to interpret what the car was doing in engineering terms and explain it very eloquently, which allowed the team to resolve those issues quickly.

‘His other passion was to make all of this objective. Ford would have a prescribed characteristic for how their cars drove, their own DNA, and Richard’s role was to define it so you could measure it and so speed up the engineering. I was lucky to have him as a mentor. I don’t think I’d be in this role were it not for Richard. He’ll be much missed.’

‘I met RPJ quite a few times,’ recalls

evo contributor Steve Sutcliffe, ‘once at Silverstone to watch qualifying for the British GP. We talked about cars all through lunch, yet despite appearing not to have watched qualifying, when he stood up three minutes later and thanked everyone for coming, he knew exactly how fast every driver had gone. He was one of those rare people who had the capacity to absorb everything that was going on around him even when he didn’t seem to be paying attention.’

Stuart Dyble, founder and CEO of Influence Associates, was manager of product PR at Ford of Britain when he met RPJ. ‘I first properly worked with him when we were launching the Ka. He was VP of small and medium cars development worldwide. We worked very closely and managed to get fivestar Autocar road tests for both Ka and the facelifted Mondeo. I quickly became his PR man and worked with him for 25 years, through the purple patch of Ka, Puma, Be91 Fiesta and Focus 1, and also Focus WRC – the Mcrae years – and Jaguar Racing.

‘There were so many memorable moments. One was driving around the twisty B-roads of North Essex in patchy freezing fog at dawn in two Fiesta 1.4 prototypes, RPJ in front and me beside a leading journalist at the wheel of the second. RPJ was really pressing and the journo was determined to keep up. A few miles in, we left the road at 40mph, straight though a hedge and into a field, did a neat circle and came out through the same hole. Ten minutes down the road there’s RPJ waiting in a layby. ‘What kept you? I was taking it easy. Oh, I see… close encounter with the scenery? Don’t worry, that will polish out.’ And with that he was off again.

‘The amazing thing that has emerged since his death is the number of people he was mentoring. As well as transforming how all Ford products handled and deeply influencing the whole industry, he was mentoring hundreds of people. This is perhaps an even greater legacy; all these people have become better versions of themselves and gone on to greater things.’